Going green to heat greenhouses more cheaply

From article in Cleveland Plain Dealer, Thurs. May 21, 2009

Eagle Creek Wholesale near Mantua is going green to heat greenhouses more cheaply
Thursday, May 21, 2009
John Funk
Plain Dealer Reporter

Mantua- Volatile energy prices over the last five years have persuaded many businesses to turn to green technologies in self defense.

Wind turbines, solar panels and energy-efficient technologies are the new hedge for businesses trying to level their energy bills - by lessening their dependence on the utilities.

But green is not always clean.

John Bonner, general manager of Eagle Creek Wholesale LLC, a greenhouse operation in rural Portage County near Mantua, can tell you all about the dirty side of green. And he's proud of it.

Bonner heats 3.5 acres of greenhouse space with manure, sawdust and wood chips.

He plans to add 2 acres under glass that will be heated the same way.

He also has begun lighting the operation with electricity generated by wind. Eagle Creek recently installed a sleek, 160-foot-tall, 50-kilowatt wind turbine manufactured by a Colorado company. A second one is on the way. The two, along with a new high-efficiency lighting system, are expected to cut the company's utility power needs by up to 80 percent per year, slashing monthly bills.

The goal is to become 100 percent energy self-sufficient, Bonner said. And he may be able to do it because of the structure of his company.

Bonner, who holds a degree in economics and finance from Capital University, operates one leg of a multicompany family business that sits on a 1,400-acre farm and includes a small trucking company, a sawdust and mulch service and a retail garden center in Bainbridge township. The farm part of the business raises up to 1,000 head of cattle a year and plants three-quarters of the acreage and 700 more acres elsewhere in corn, soybeans and winter wheat.

The operations support one another. The cattle stalls produce fuel. The trucking division delivers sawdust from regional sawmills to the many nearby horse stables, bringing back more fuel. Trucks also deliver hundreds of thousands of flower and vegetable starts to retailers throughout the region.

All of this is done with a focus on energy efficiency and being green.

But Bonner is no ideologue. "I like the idea of being a steward and taking care of the planet," he said. "That's good. But the bottom line is the bottom line.

"I can't make ideological decisions just because I want to. When ideology and good business decisions come together, then everybody benefits."

The small commercial wind turbines the company is buying are the symbols of green technology - sleek white machines that many Americans still see as futuristic.

Manure and waste wood burners are something else. Hulking steel and iron giants, they appear to be straight out of the 19th century, when coal was king. And they can burn coal. But they are actually recyclers, making energy out of waste. Bonner has an EPA permit to burn wood waste, corn and even tires.

In more snooty terms, Bonner is burning "biomass," wood and animal waste that was, well, going to waste.

That was before Eagle Creek's gas bills looked like they would total $200,000 in the winter of 2005-06, after hurricanes Rita and Katrina shut down gas rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

Bonner flew to Germany to check out renewable technologies and diesel fuel substitutes for the trucking company. He tried the biodiesel, but the costs were too high. The wind and biomass were financially feasible, and Bonner bought an American-made boiler and turbines.

Eagle Creek's 5 million-BTU boiler is fired by a mixture of sawdust, wood chips, "cow pies" and "road apples," the latter material coming from cattle and horse stalls. These solid fuels are allowed to dry a bit in enormous open-ended Quonset huts that look a little like giant, half-buried pipes.

BTU levels are a function of how much moisture is in the fuel, Bonner said. Wood has nearly twice the BTU value as manure, even dried manure, he said, and the boiler burns more wood than waste on the coldest winter days.

The 30,000-gallon computerized boiler was "idling" on a recent sunny but chilly day, keeping more than 60,000 gallons of water at 200 degrees and pressurized to about 25 pounds per square inch. Another cold night was ahead.

Smoke from the short stack was whitish - and odorless. That was not the case inside the large boiler building, where the air carried distinct barn smells and a certain aroma hard to describe - not horrible, but not exactly good.

The combustion chamber read 660 degrees, tech employee Gary Janson said, as the automated system slowly fed it minuscule amounts of material.

The only sound was the whoosh of fans and compressors ensuring complete combustion, punctuated occasionally by the mechanical banging and buzzing of a conveyor belt bringing up more fuel.

The fuel was stored in an adjoining room consisting of one very large pile of manure mixture and one equally large pile of mulch-like wood waste. Both were neatly piled, chest-high, in side-by-side, rectangular-shaped concrete stalls.

The stall floors were equipped with metal paddles that slowly moved the materials onto a conveyor system that sifted, sorted and mixed the bits and pieces before sending it into the fire box.

The super-heated water is piped into the nearby greenhouses. That's when things get really high-tech and ultra-efficient.

The greenhouses are automated: Everything - from the light levels, to the humidity, to the air and floor temperatures, to the watering and fertilizing - is computer-controlled. Even the water is collected, measured and recycled.

Competitors who don't embrace technology like this probably won't be around in 30 years, Bonner said, defending the huge capital expense of the operation and green energy investments.

The wind turbines cost $250,000 apiece - though $175,000 in federal and state grant money means the system may pay for itself in five or six years. Even more than the biomass boiler, the turbines are computerized robots, generating the maximum amount of power possible under varying wind speeds.

The massive boiler cost even more than the two turbines - Bonner didn't disclose the exact amount - and current low natural gas prices make the payback time hard to calculate. But the cost of the biomass is free, or nearly so, he said.

"When the price of natural gas is down, like now, we don't necessarily have a competitive advantage," he said. "But when gas goes up, people have to raise their prices and we don't - and hopefully we'll gain market share. We are making long-term strategic decisions."

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

jfunk@plaind.com, 216-999-4138